In one of my more prescient bits of political analysis recently, I weighed in on an on-line discussion for my public policy class about Occupy Wall Street. The gist of the discussion was that the movement was a loser because they could not agree on concrete proposals, much less push them through to actual policy. I argued that the movement would have it’s greatest chance for success by simply changing the political narrative in this country. Dare I say, “Mission Accomplished.” When Paul Ryan feels the need to give speeches defending the Republicans on the issue (naturally, the only way to do so is with lies and half-truths), OWS has already won. Here’s EJ Dionne on the matter:

But what’s most instructive is that Ryan would not have given this speech if the Republican Party were not so worried that it is losing control of the political narrative. In particular, growing inequalities of wealth and income — which should have been a central issue in American politics for at least a decade — are now finally at the heart of our discourse. We are, at last, discussing the social and economic costs of concentrating ever more resources in the hands of the top sliver of our society.

Ryan offered the classic defense of inequality, arguing that what really matters is upward mobility, and that the United States has more of it than those horrible welfare states in Europe. “Class is not a fixed designation in this country,” he declared. “We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups.”

The only problem is that upward mobility has declined as inequality has grown, and social mobility is now higher in Europe than it is in the United States. That’s shameful. And don’t believe me on this: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum brought this up at a recent debate, backed by a study from the Economic Mobility Project.

It’s hard to justify more tax cuts for the wealthy in a country that is becoming more rigidly stratified by class. And if it is class warfare simply to acknowledge the facts, does this make Santorum a class warrior?

Yep. Santorum is basically an idiot, but you know what they say about broken clocks. Nonetheless, good for him. Regardless of anything else, shifting our larger political discussion from short-term deficits (which really aren’t a big deal– I did say short term) to structural and growing inequality (which is a big deal) is a huge victory for the OWS movement– whether that’s what they intended or not.

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For some odd reason, the “Under the Dome” column in yesterday’s N&O went ahead and basically printed a press release from the Pope Foundation’s Civitas Institute. Anyway, it was really just absurd Estate Tax Spin. Via Civitas:

Two-thirds of voters oppose the estate tax in North Carolina, according to a new poll released today by the Civitas Institute.

When a North Carolina resident dies, the state government levies a tax of up to 16 percent on assets above $5 million and everything else the deceased owned. The tax is levied in addition to the Federal estate tax of 35 percent. Sixty-six percent of voters oppose this practice while 25 percent said they support it. Seven percent said they do not know or have no opinion.

Civitas tries to (or at least typically, it seems to me) play themselves as a fair-minded polling organization, but yet we get this:

“Voters across North Carolina widely recognize the inherent immorality of turning revenue department officials into grave robbers [emphasis mine]. Hopefully, state lawmakers will recognize the near-universal opposition to the state death tax and act to end this gruesome practice,” said Civitas Institute budget and tax policy analyst Brian Balfour.

Yowza– that’s strong language. Not exactly designed to place a lot of confidence in Civitas’ polling. Need I mention that 2/3 while a strong majority hardly represents “near-universal” opposition. More importantly, though, I strongly, suspect that if voters actually understood what was going on with the estate tax, the numbers would look like this. The polling question:

“When a North Carolina resident dies, the state government levies a tax of up to 16% on assets above $5 million which includes businesses, homes, farm animals, bank accounts and everything else the deceased owned. The tax is levied in addition to the Federal estate tax of 35%. Please tell me if you support or oppose this practice?”

My guess is that most people here something like, “North Carolina resident…dies… tax…homes… bank accounts… everything else(!)” What if you asked a question and laying out the tax and said quite clearly: “this tax would only apply to North Carolina residents who have more than $5 million when then die.” Or better yet, “the less than 1/4 of 1% of NC Residents…” I’m confident the poll results would be dramatically different. It’s also worth noting that a very substantial portion of the estate tax captures unrealized Capital Gains that would otherwise never be taxed. If you bought $1000 of Apple stock in the 1990s’s that was worth $100,000 today, you’d owe taxes on it if you sold it. However, if you never sold it, but passed it on to your heirs, that $99,000 capital gain is untaxed. Taxing such gains is mostly what the estate tax is about. There’s plenty of myths (you’d simply never believe which political party tends to spread them) about the Estate Tax and the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities nicely takes on the key ones, if you are curious.

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Really fun excerpt from the new book, You Are Not So Smart over at the Atlantic. Love this bit about experiments with wine tasting (mostly because I pretty much hate the taste of all wine):

In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.

In one experiment, he got 54 oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?

The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it complex and rounded. They called the same wine in the cheap bottle weak and flat.

I’m guessing I’ve read 75% or so of the material in here in other books. That said, I love the examples in the excerpt (there’s some more really good ones) and will probably give it a try.

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Nice video from Stephen Colbert on the impact of Alabama’s new immigration law on farming. Guess what? Americans don’t want to do back-breaking work in the fields all day. Even with unemployment at 9%.

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George Will was never the great intellectual many have believed him to be (seriously, you go around in a bow time all day and see how much smarter people think you are), but this is just sad. Either he’s actually gotten dumber or he’s decided he’s got to channel the anti-intellectual Republican zeitgeist to stay in the good graces of conservatives. From his latest column:

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” [emphasis mine] (although there is precious little to support Romney’s idea that in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants is a powerful magnet for such immigrants) and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) “competence,” not “ideology.” But what would President Romney competently do when not pondering ethanol subsidies that he forthrightly says should stop sometime before “forever”? Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?

Yes, data. Conservatives don’t like Romney in part because he lets facts and events influence his views. This is unacceptable. So as Republicans come around to the idea that he may be the party’s best hope in 2012, conservative hold outs are trying to prevent the Romney consensus from taking hold.

Wow, that’s really saying something about the ideology of a movement when even the supposed intellectuals in your movement seem to think that data-based thinking and competence are bad things.

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The Atlantic’s Chris Good makes the case that in the modern Tea Party era, Herman Cain doesn’t actually need an organization to win the Republican nomination:

That’s an embarrassing revelation for the Republican Party’s 2012 poll leader, but here’s the thing: Cain might not actually need a campaign.

Cain’s operation may be disorganized and unprepared, but if we’ve learned anything from recent GOP primaries, it’s that you don’t actually need a developed campaign staff in order to win — particularly if you’re a tea partier.

The 2010 elections saw tea-party Senate candidates defeat established opponents (the Mitt Romneys of the midterm election year) without much organization at all. They rode their images to victory, and, while they lost against Democrats in November, they proved that conservative primary voters will see the tea-party bat signal and turn out to vote for a candidate they may know little about.

Take, for example, Christine O’Donnell. She emerged from nowhere to win Delaware’s Senate primary over the longtime favorite, then-congressman Mike Castle, and she did it without much of a team around her…

Or take Alaska’s Joe Miller. Less than two months before his August primary against Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), he was paying nine people to work for his campaign…

These candidates didn’t win by out-organizing their opponents; they won by attracting voters to a basic image.

If Cain enters the early states with momentum, having cast himself as the leading conservative alternative to Romney, he may not need a real campaign organization to ask Republicans to show up and vote for him. They could very well show up for him anyway.

Still don’t see that as all that likely, but Good does make a good case. If this does pan out, I’m going to have to significantly re-write my lecture notes on presidential primary campaigns. Especially the parts that emphasize the importance of organization.